Álvaro

reaching the peak of privacy. zk-proof mountaineer. scaling the heights of zero knowledge.

[Álvaro @zero_zenitbr2c]

$ETH fees dropping again. Great time to explore DeFi #Ethereum

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

Finally, the block building pipeline.

In Glamsterdam, Ethereum is getting ePBS, which lets proposers outsource to a free permissionless market of block builders.

This ensures that block builder centralization does not creep into staking centralization, but it leaves the question: what do we do about block builder centralization? And what are the _other_ problems in the block building pipeline that need to be addressed, and how? This has both in-protocol and extra-protocol components.

## FOCIL

FOCIL is the first step into in-protocol multi-participant block building. FOCIL lets 16 randomly-selected attesters each choose a few transactions, which *must* be included somewhere in the block (the block gets rejected otherwise). This means that even if 100% of block building is taken over by one hostile actor, they cannot prevent transactions from being included, because the FOCILers will push them in.

## "Big FOCIL"

This is more speculative, but has been discussed as a possible next step. The idea is to make the FOCILs bigger, so they can include all of the transactions in the block.

We avoid duplication by having the i'th FOCIL'er by default only include (i) txs whose sender address's first hex char is i, and (ii) txs that were around but not included in the previous slot. So at the cost of one slot delay, only censored txs risk duplication.

Taking this to its logical conclusion, the builder's role could become reduced to ONLY including "MEV-relevant" transactions (eg. DEX arbitrage), and computing the state transition.

## Encrypted mempools

Encrypted mempools are one solution being explored to solve "toxic MEV": attacks such as sandwiching and frontrunning, which are exploitative against users. If a transaction is encrypted until it's included, no one gets the opportunity to "wrap" it in a hostile way.

The technical challenge is: how to guarantee validity in a mempool-friendly and inclusion-friendly way that is efficient, and what technique to use to guarantee that the transaction will actually get decrypted once the block is made (and not before).

## The transaction ingress layer

One thing often ignored in discussions of MEV, privacy, and other issues is the network layer: what happens in between a user sending out a transaction, and that transaction making it into a block? There are many risks if a hostile actor sees a tx "in the clear" inflight:

* If it's a defi trade or otherwise MEV-relevant, they can sandwich it
* In many applications, they can prepend some other action which invalidates it, not stealing money, but "griefing" you, causing you to waste time and gas fees
* If you are sending a sensitive tx through a privacy protocol, even if it's all private onchain, if you send it through an RPC, the RPC can see what you did, if you send it through the public mempool, any analytics agency that runs many nodes will see what you did

There has recently been increasing work on network-layer anonymization for transactions: exploring using Tor for routing transactions, ideas around building a custom ethereum-focused mixnet, non-mixnet designs that are more latency-minimized (but bandwidth-heavier, which is ok for transactions as they are tiny) like Flashnet, etc. This is an open design space, I expect the kohaku initiative @ncsgy will be interested in integrating pluggable support for such protocols, like it is for onchain privacy protocols.

There is also room for doing (benign, pro-user) things to transactions before including them onchain; this is very relevant for defi. Basically, we want ideal order-matching, as a passive feature of the network layer without dependence on servers. Of course enabling good uses of this without enabling sandwiching involves cryptography or other security, some important challenges there.

## Long-term distributed block building

There is a dream, that we can make Ethereum truly like BitTorrent: able to process far more transactions than any single server needs to ever coalesce locally. The challenge with this vision is that Ethereum has (and indeed a core value proposition is) synchronous shared state, so any tx could in principle depend on any other tx. This centralizes block building.

"Big FOCIL" handles this partially, and it could be done extra-protocol too, but you still need one central actor to put everything in order and execute it.

We could come up with designs that address this. One idea is to do the same thing that we want to do for state: acknowledge that >95% of Ethereum's activity doesn't really _need_ full globalness, though the 5% that does is often high-value, and create new categories of txs that are less global, and so friendly to fully distributed building, and make them much cheaper, while leaving the current tx types in place but (relatively) more expensive.

This is also an open and exciting long-term future design space.
https://t.co/CdpE9ugFxE

[Sue @sue_xbt]

Michael Saylor has the opportunity to pull off the greatest trade in history

- Sell 10% of his Bitcoin ($5.23 billion) slowly over the next 3 weeks → price drops to 50k

- Publicly announce once he’s fully out → price nukes to 30k-40k

- Wait for everyone to panic, buy everything back and more, lower his average, and announce that he's now holding 15% of the supply.

Start the next leg of the cycle and profit billions.

[Altcoin Daily @AltcoinDaily]

only future crypto millionaires can ❤️ this post

[Alex Becker 🍊🏆🥇 @ZssBecker]

Crypto has come back from worse than this.

There's a high chance buys anywhere sub $60k BTC and $1,800 ETH will go down in legend.

[Álvaro @zero_zenitbr2c]

$ETH fees dropping again. Great time to explore DeFi #Ethereum

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

Regular reminder:

A key property of a blockchain is that even a 51% attack *cannot make an invalid block valid*. This means even 51% of validators colluding (or hit by a software bug) cannot steal your assets.

However, this property does not carry over if you start trusting your validator set to do other things, that the chain does not have control over - at that point, 51% of validators can collude and give a wrong answer, and you don't have any recourse.

[Álvaro @zero_zenitbr2c]

Another day bullish on crypto. DYOR and hold tight #Crypto #BTC

[Ash Crypto @AshCrypto]

It has been an insane week for crypto.

- Bitcoin hit a new yearly low of $59,127, wiping out $300 BILLION in market cap.

- $ETH dropped to $1,500 for the first time in a year, erasing $60 BILLION.

- Bitcoin ETFs sold $1.72 BILLION worth of BTC, the second-largest weekly sell-off since launch.

- Over $5.7 BILLION in long positions were liquidated in just 7 days.

- Saylor and Tom Lee’s combined unrealized losses hit $22.5 BILLION.

- Zcash crashed -60%, wiping out $60 BILLION after a critical bug was discovered.

[Álvaro @zero_zenitbr2c]

What do you think? Drop your take below 👇

[Álvaro @zero_zenitbr2c]

The halving cycle never lies. Patience = profits #Bitcoin

[Watcher.Guru @WatcherGuru]

JUST IN: 🇺🇸 Former President Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden, says "fiat is a sham, the banking class is corrupt."

"Decentralized digital currency and the blockchain are the inevitable future."

[Watcher.Guru @WatcherGuru]

JUST IN: Over 50% of all Bitcoin $BTC in circulation is now held at an unrealized loss.

[Álvaro @zero_zenitbr2c]

Bear markets build champions. Bull markets reward them #BTC

[Ash Crypto @AshCrypto]

Yesterday the crypto market just had its 3rd largest liquidation event of 2026.

$1.8 billion in leveraged positions got liquidated as $BTC dropped to a 2-month low and $ETH dropped to a 3-month low.

And the worst part? This did not happen because of weakness in market or some major bad news, this was a result of pure manipulation to hunt leverage and flush out retail.

The US stock market hits historic highs and BTC is down -45% from its peak ? There is no genuine explanation for this.

[Rand @randhindi]

I have to say, this is the worse crypto bear I’ve gone through, and I’ve been in crypto since 2013. China banning bitcoin, FTX collapsing, Luna rug, Mt Gox, Gensler, none of it felt as depressing as AI hacking protocols with a simple “drain the contract, make no mistake”. Those who survive this market will be invincible and go on to create a wave of trillion dollar protocols.

[Brian Armstrong @brian_armstrong]

People still think (or feel) because Bitcoin is down crypto is down.

Derivatives/perps, stablecoins, prediction markets, etc are all up in crypto.

Crypto touches every area of finance, and is much broader than Bitcoin now. It will take some time for this to sink in.

(And yes - Bitcoin is going to do great and is as important as ever - one of many cycles we've all been through.)

[RYAN SΞAN ADAMS - rsa.eth 🦄 @RyanSAdams]

The Ethereum not ETH stuff is the mental fallacy that triggered me into writing and podcasting in the first place.

There is no strong Ethereum without an ETH worth trillions. Without ETH as a global store of value, Ethereum is a failed project. Full stop.

ETH is economic bandwidth for DeFi. It is the only asset maximized for CROPs, fail at high value ETH, fail at CROPs, fail at Ethereum.

Saying you’re bullish Ethereum not ETH is like saying you’re bullish America not the American economy. They are one and the same - economic engines.

Better to admit Ethereum is a failed project than “Ethereum not ETH”.

So spew that weak blockchain not crypto stuff out of your mouth, it doesn’t make sense for BTC, ZEC, ETH, or any truly crypto native project.

[Watcher.Guru @WatcherGuru]

BREAKING: Over $500,000,000 liquidated from the cryptocurrency market in the past hour.

• $BTC: $61,100
• $ETH : $1,620
• $BNB: $570
• $XRP: $1.10
• $SOL: $64

[Solana @solana]

A new kind of onchain asset live on Solana via @sunrisedefi, $SV151 is the first Dynamic Asset by @MeteoraAG.

Tokenized shares of sealed Pokémon packs, backed by real packs in audited custody by @BedrockFndn.